Director: Marvin Schulze
Writer: Marvin Schulze
Cast: Jonte Volkmann, Marina Senckel
Running time: 25mins
Before we get any further, I will need to point out that the film’s title is actually, officially, KREI•SELN – all caps, with a funny dot thing in the middle, in the style of a dictionary definition. I’m not going to bother typing it that way, because 1. I’m lazy, and the film hasn’t inspired me not to be, and 2. It’s a badly-thought out marketing ploy, which should not be encouraged.
If anyone who had seen Kreiseln and wanted to recommend it to someone via text, the hassle of either working out where the • symbol is lurking, or copying and pasting from an internet listing, will likely put them off mid-sentence. That’s a big if, though, because Kreiseln is a convoluted web of nonsense.
Kreiseln (according to the dictionary definition which kicks off the film, that’s German for Spinning) centres on Jakob, who is attempting to get his late grandmother’s affairs in order. Coming to his aid, as he wades through the paperwork, are his identical twin, Simon, and Simon’s partner Melina. As the evening progresses, Jakob begins to get strange premonitions about the gathering – but everyone seems every-so-slightly different in the scenarios he is seeing. His friendly and generous brother Simon is suddenly a controlling and insidious presence, while Melina seems to have the hots for Jakob.
As the two parallel universes, or subconscious fantasies, play out, many things are confusing or open to interpretation (depending on how you want to sell it), but one thing is for sure: director Marvin Schulze made a bad call in casting the same actor to play both twins. Jonte Volkman might not have that much to get his teeth into from Schulze’s script, but as both Jakob and Simon, he fails to present us enough distinction for us to care who is who, or to notice when their ‘roles’ invert in the alternate worlds we are shown. Perhaps that’s why Melina doesn’t really seem to bother distinguishing at a certain point either.
It would be entirely too harsh to say this was all Volkman’s fault, as an actor. However, the credits reveal that he collaborated with Schulze on the editing and camera-work throughout the story – making him further culpable for what transpired. The technical aspects of shooting one actor as two are crucial if the audience is to understand what we are being told, and where we will need to suspend our disbelief for the story – let alone if we are to understand when and where things are taking an odd turn.
Things begin to go wrong immediately. When Jakob first answers the door to Simon, convention would require at least one wide shot of both twins, standing opposite each other – establishing that these are two identical people, showing us where they are clearly, and helping us remember who is wearing what, so we can distinguish them later. But Schulze and assistant Volkman disregard this immediately – and the incredibly simple split-screen trickery this would have required, considering neither brother even comes close to touching the other – leaving us second-guessing ourselves.
On the one hand, as the conversation progresses through weird back-and-forth cuts, it feels utterly disjointed, like these two people are not in the same room (funnily enough, a lot of the discussion with Gregg Wallace in MasterChef used to be shot like that…) while the 180-degree rule is violated, so it is unclear which of the brothers poor Melina (Marina Senckel, making a valiant effort) is talking to. At the same time, without the visual confirmation of them both being there, it also kind of makes the twins thing seem less likely – because who among us hasn’t become utterly lost when being introduced to two blond men of the same age in another film? Perhaps these are two different people, and this is all just my fault for not paying attention? Maybe I need to book at the opticians…
As things progress, and an underdeveloped plot around a Nazi treasure-trove in the Bizarro House emerges, frenetic confusion turns into intense shocks of embarrassment. As Schulze tries to cram three stories into one mid-sized run-time, suddenly the audience is being dragged through one of the least erotic sex-scene every committed to screen (the woman sighs as she straddles a sweaty man in a white vest who seems to cosplay as Aardman’s Wallace when he goes to bed). No sooner as that is over, two men who can’t be seen on screen together are throwing punches at each other – strange cutaways showing them reacting to fists that were never in the same frame.
When things slow down a little bit, we get a glimpse of what might have been. Schulze has deftly positioned spiders throughout the set, which scuttle away just before actors interact with them. One appears in a bread-bin, and after a series of silent-comedy-style distractions, ends up in a sandwich that Jakob starts mindlessly crunching his way through before bed. This is followed by strange noises coming from the attic prompting him to investigate, and a genuinely well-realised jump-scare (involving a nightmare creature which is foregrounded earlier, but still seems to have nothing to do with the ‘A-plot’) leaves him sprawled on his back at the bottom of the ladder.
There are so many small details which could have worked to build for this kind of a horror, but which the director seems not to have really been interested in. Another nice idea is that lamp next to the door, which glows brighter whenever the doorbell rings – a signal of the faulty wiring Jakob and Simon’s grandmother had probably been living with for decades, which could also have been used to help deliver a scare after dark.
Could haves and should haves don’t amount to much at the end of the day, though. This could have been an inventive short-horror (either played simply for a smaller run-time, or with more complexity for something longer than half-an-hour). This should have been at least competently shot, in a way in which Schulze and Volkman gave as much detail to building their lead characters as they did the strange little house they are in. This is a film caught in three or four minds about what is wants to be, or realising none of those parallel potentials well as a result.
I love horror. I love creative, low-budget filmmaking. I wanted so badly to be able to love Kreiseln as well. Maybe in another mirror world I did – but unfortunately, that scatter-brained doppelganger does not run Indy Film Library.